Comment by babypuncher
2 years ago
There's a local italian restaurant that I frequent which is 30% cheaper than Olive Garden and way, way tastier. There are dozens of other local restaurants that are also cheaper, and tastier, than Olive Garden.
I don't understand why these huge restaurant companies have such a hard time with the "make good food" part of their business model. It clearly can't be that hard if so many small businesses are able to do do it better.
The entire schtick of chain restaurants is consistency. For nationwide chains, that means that the same ingredients end up being used in relatively remote places without cheap access to fresh produce as in, say, California, where fresh produce is far more affordable.
The big chains also tend to aim for excessive variety on their menus, which again leads to food needing to be designed to be less perishable.
And then there's the chunk of profits that are going to run the national presence, ad spend, and line the pockets of shareholders.
All of this just doesn't seem like it flies with consumers in 2024.
I think people value quality over consistency when it comes to their leisure spending, especially when small restaurants can still be consistently good. Why do I care that the pancakes at an IHOP in Tampa taste the same as the IHOP in my neighborhood when the local diner across the street makes better pancakes than either of them?
Having lots of options doesn't mean a whole lot if all of them suck.
The national presence I think works to their detriment. Being able to buy ad spots during the superbowl makes a restaurant categorically un-cool. The number of times "I don't want to eat at a chain restaurant" comes up when discussing places to eat with my friends has practically turned the sentiment into a meme.
I imagine social media has played a huge role in this shift. People posting actual pictures of the food they got somewhere does a lot to undercut deceptive advertising and elevates meals that actually get people excited.
I believe there is some market for consistency when your market is explicitly travelers.
This is probably why so many motels have chain restaurants in the parking lot: if you've just spent 7 hours in the car getting there, or are primarily staying there on the way to get somewhere else, convenient and predictable trumps good.
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> I don't understand why these huge restaurant companies have such a hard time with the "make good food" part of their business model. It clearly can't be that hard if so many small businesses are able to do do it better.
They would need to have people in the restaurant, tasting the food, observing the business, etc, and empowered to make decisions based upon the evidence. These companies are the opposite of that, and take away that power from the people actually conducting the operation. Even if they could get great cooks, waiters, hosts, managers, etc, to work at these restaurants, the value that they bring would be stifled.
I imagine the logistics of sourcing enough ingredients to supply a nationwide chain are much more complicated than a single local establishment, which pushes the nationwide chains towards more-consistent but lower-quality solutions like just buying from Sysco.
At that point you would think they would pivot to using their economies of scale to compete on price. But they're still more expensive than better local alternatives.
My best guess is that the price is inflated by the huge amount of money they spend on national ad campaigns, which I'm convinced at this point do not even work. Any restaurant big enough to buy ad spots during the superbowl is by definition "not cool" to the under-40 crowd. None of the most popular restaurants among my peer-group where I live even run local TV ads, and they don't need to.